marijuana

I have come here to highlight another gross violation of my good standing and name during my vacation in Amsterdam as well as to reassure everyone of my outstanding reputation which may have been tarnished with these revelations.

Coffeeshops in Amsterdam sells space cakes and space muffins for about Euro 5 (RM 20 or so). It differs from coffeeshop to coffeeshop – I assume they make it themselves since all the ones I’ve been to contain different packaging and sizes.

I bought and ate one as a snack one day. It tastes just like chocolate cake – what my mom would bake (no pun intended) in her very wholesome kitchen. It’s quite delicious really. My mistake was that I did not look at the ingredients before I naively consumed it.

The paper slip inside the space cake starts out with “Inexperienced marijuana users are advised not to eat space cake” and ends with the shocking revelation that the very item I was consuming contains 0.40 (measurements not indicated) of cannabis and gorilla glue weed.

I rushed to the toilet and forced myself to throw up by sticking two fingers down my throat. Hereby, with my stomach totally regurgitated of the vile cannabis infused muffin did I take stock of what just had happened. I’m glad I managed to completely empty my stomach by voluntary vomiting after unwittingly consuming spacecake. I just didn’t know what it was.

This is the second time I’ve been fooled in Amsterdam. Well, I never! Hmph.

I didn’t sleep much on the flight to Amsterdam from London so one of the first things I did was to pop into a coffeeshop and grab an old fashioned cup of coffee. I reckon a mug of Joe would warm me up and give me the caffeine hit to see all the sights Amsterdam has to offer.

The first sense that something wasn’t quite right was the wonderful smell wafting tantalizingly out of the coffeeshops. It smelled herbal but it’s not cigarettes. I didn’t think much of it – if people wanted to smoke cigars or whatever it was they smoked over in the Netherlands, they’re free to do so.

I entered the coffeeshop and looked at the menu in confusion. Super Lemon Haze? White Widow? Amnesia Haze? Afgani Polm?

The coffee beans in Amsterdam sure has some weird ass names. I figured it was a direct Dutch to English translation so I just pointed to one that won some kind of award in 2009 and the nice person behind the counter showed me the product.

It looked more like tea than coffee but perhaps that’s what coffee looks like over here. It’s my first time here so what the hell. There is another type of coffee which looks more like coffee though so I ordered that instead.

It came as a huge shock to me when it came to my table. It’s called Nepal First Cream and it came in a sticky goo that you’re supposed to crumble it into a smoking device (which I later learned is called a bong) and light it up.

I was horrified! The proverbial light bulb came on and I realized what I was being offered. Cannabis! Hash! The travesty of it all! I couldn’t believe it and stormed out of the coffeeshop with righteous anger and my head held high with the THC laden hashish left untouched on the table.

This is a public service announcement – The Platinum Fashion Mall
in Bangkok is evil. It’s a wholesale emporium of attire, a shopper’s
paradise and it will drain all your baht away. I think I spent 3,000
baht just on clothes just now.

The Platinum Fashion Mall has a lot of floors dedicated to all sorts
of attire you can think of – I spent a lot of baht in one shop alone.

It’s called Marijuana. How can you not buy stuff from this place? I
got a lot of t-shirts for myself and also – Cherie, Irene, Joanne,
David, Jimmy and Robyn, I got you all stuff from this place, you’ll
love it!

I ended up looking like this…and I’m not even much of a shopper! I
just couldn’t resist the counter-culture, drug and sex reference
t-shirts. The place is really cheap too, if you bargain, you can get
probably 5 t-shirts for 500 baht (RM 50).

The Platinum Fashion Mall is a baht drainer coz it has its own food
court as well so you can spend the entire day there if you’re so
inclined (and you probably would if you visit every shop in this huge
mall).

The food court at The Platinum Fashion Mall uses a coupon system for
purchasing food. There were three of us, and we each got 100 baht
credit coupon cards and shared the food.

I ordered Somtam (the famous Thai mango salad) with
blue crabs and chicken feet (55 baht) and the mango salad was pounded
into a dish that looked like this:

It tastes REALLY GOOD. I can’t describe how good it tastes, it was
just so good that I nearly came while eating it. My dining companion
(MDC from this post onwards to protect her privacy) and Jia Chui (a
pharmacist from KL that I met at the hotel) both agreed somtam is THE
SHIT.

Please do try Somtam if you’re ever in Thailand, it’s orgasmic!

Other highlights is this dish with really hot sauce (don’t know what it’s called) that was really good as well.

There’s also a local home made grilled bread that we ordered.

This is the chilli paste and pork floss version (15 baht). It’s great!

This is the Thailand tea custard version (12 baht) which MDC ordered. It tastes like tea custard.

Just be careful when you walk down the many aisles of The Platinum
Fashion Mall…it’s temptation personified in a large concrete
building. You’re going to spend a lot of baht here coz everything seems
cheap.

Cones is a brand of joint paper cones made by Mountain High
[mountainhigh.nl]. It retails for A$3.95 at Off Ya Tree, a local
headshop. I’ll be honest with ya, my butter fingers can’t roll good
joints. The joints that I make inevitably draws very poorly, due to the
cannabis not being packed tightly. Cigarette smokers, you know what I
mean. When you don’t ‘pack’ a pack of cigarettes by tapping it upside
down against your hand before opening, the draw (referring to the air
flow here) becomes very poor. I don’t know how to explain it, but
packing cigarettes optimizes the air flow and makes it draw better.

Anyway, enough about (the lack of) my joint rolling skillz. I
usually smoke marijuana using a bong because smoking it with joints
seems like such a waste of good cannabis. However, there are times when
toking on a joint seems appropriate, like during celebrations or in
situations where it’s not feasible to carry around a bong with you. The
Cones by Mountain High comes in a pack of three and is made using king
sized joint paper.

The instructions at the back shows two methods of filling the cone –
by pushing the cannabis into the cone using the supplied straw, or by
tipping the cannabis directly into the cone. Personally, I find the
first way to be easier. The cone can be laid flat against any surface
and filled by pushing the pre-shredded cannabis into the cone. This
makes it less prone to structural damage to the cone. I’ll explain more
in the paragraph below.

The second method is done by tipping the cannabis into the cone
instead of pushing it. The packaging of Cones has this removable hole
on the upper right hand corner with the word Remove. By
removing the hole and putting the package back side up, there is a
place for you to place the cone while you fill it using the second
method. The packaging of the front is such that it produces an elevated
platform for the cone to be placed in the hole when it’s overturned.
Very nifty indeed. However, this method makes it easy to accidentally
touch the cone with the card you’re using to drop the cannabis into the
cone. Doing this of course makes it bend at the weakest point (the
thinnest point closes to the filter) and has the potential to tear the
cone if you do it hard enough.

Now to the taste test. The paper used to make the cone is thin, and
it tends to burn too fast for my liking even if you’re not toking on
it, which is wasteful. The taste of the cone leaves much to be desired
as well. It has this rice paper taste which is unnatural and somewhat
distasteful. The taste of the paper tends to overshadow the sweet
tasting marijuana smoke. The structure of the cone is pretty flimsy as
well, but that shouldn’t pose a problem if you’re reasonably careful.

Personally, I don’t like it enough to want to buy it again. But it
certainly has its merits. The cardboard filter works well in keeping
the shredded cannabis in the joint instead of drawing it into your
lungs which is an ‘Ack!’ moment that I always have when rolling my own
joints. If you look hard enough, you can see small groove patterns in
the paper, like the ones most cigarettes have. This is to make the
joint burn evenly, and it does that well. A nice touch, this. Also, the
straw included in each cone is perfect for packing the marijuana into
the cone, leading to a very good draw.

It’s A$3.95, which isn’t really expensive, but you can get rolling papers for much less than that. I’ll prefer the Royal Blunts EZ Roll Tube [sixthseal.com] though, if I want a change from smoking from a bong.

I purchased this blunt wrapper from Off Ya Tree a couple of days ago. It’s made by Royal Blunts
[royalblunts.com] and I decided that today was a good day as any to
smoke a blunt, being Chinese New Year and everything. :) A blunt is a
cigar with cannabis inside instead of tobacco. It retails for A$3.95
and Off Ya Tree has several other flavors besides cognac. Cannabis sold
separately, of course.

Inside the packaging is a single leaf of tobacco and a plastic tube.

Anyway, the package is air sealed and has a single blunt wrapper
inside and a plastic tube, which serves the dual function of preventing
the leaf of tobacco from getting squashed in the package and to pack
weed into the blunt you’re rolling. The blunt wrapper was surprisingly
fresh, it didn’t reek like stale cigars do.

Rolling the blunt.

The blunt wrapper was easy to roll too, and it sealed by itself. I
did give the side of the wrap a lick to make it seal better though. I
used the plastic tube to pack the cannabis tightly, as I prefer the
draw of a tightly packed cigarette as opposed to an unpacked one. In
lieu of a roach (a cardboard piece you put at the end of joints as a
filter), I folded the end of the blunt and it works just as well. I
didn’t inhale any small bits of plant material even when I toked hard
on the blunt.

The blunt.

And the taste of the blunt…oh my God, it was simply divine! Very,
very tasty indeed. It will be hard to go back to smoking bowls after
this. The cognac flavored wrapper achieves this synergy with the choof,
providing this rich, satisfying smoke that tastes pleasant and smells
wonderful. It tasted like a good cigar with the sweet, sweet smoke of
cannabis instead of tobacco. The burn rate was very controlled too, the
tip burns slowly when you’re not toking on it and even when you draw on
it, it doesn’t burn that fast either, just a slowly moving red rim that
produces a nice lungful of that rich, satisfying smoke. It gives a
slightly different high too, there was the added stimulant high from
the tobacco leaf wrapper. Highly recommended!

Preparation: I shredded some cannabis buds into small bits
and put them in this 95% (190 proof) pure grain alcohol called
Spirytus. Yes, that’s 95% Vol/Alc. I think this is the highest amount
of stable alcohol you can have without it pulling moisture from the
atmosphere and re-diluting it self. This is similar to the spirit
marketed as Everclear in the United States. I got this bottle at a
Greek bottle shop near my place. It’s A$ 50 for the 500 ml bottle. The
cashier asked me what I wanted it for, and I said “to dissolve plant
material in” and he went “oh okay”. :) Heh.

The front of the bottle – Spirytus

Anyway, I did drink quite a bit of the stuff, it really packs a
punch if you drink it neat. I usually pour some of the stuff into a
plastic bottle of diet coke and drink it. I learnt that this could be a
bad idea though, the grain alcohol is also solvent grade so it could
dissolve plastic. I’m not saying that it can, I really don’t know, but
it could. It easily rubbed off the blue use by dates on those bottles
anyway. It also tends to turn a chilled drink into a warm drink. Yuck.

The back of the bottle – Spirytus Pure Spirit 95% Vol/Alc

I’m digressing. Anyway, before I came back for a holiday, I shredded
some cannabis buds and put it into what remained of the bottle. When I
returned a couple of days ago, I noticed that the alcohol had been
colored a nice green by the cannabis. The cannabis has been left in the
bottle for a total of 5 weeks (and 3 days) so that should be sufficient
to allow the THC to leach out from the plant into the alcohol. I kept
it in a dark cupboard all this while and it turned a deeper green when
I shook the bottle. Anyway, I felt that this was a good time as any to
have a taste so I took a couple of shots in some diet coke on an empty
stomach.

The result after 5 weeks (and 3 days)

Time: 1:16 am

Poured 3 1/2 shots into 300 ml of diet coke. It tastes EXACTLY like
what marijuana smoke tastes like when inhaled. nice. yum. I think the
alcohol dissolved some nasty stuff from the plastic bottles too…yuck.
it tastes chemical. Chugged it anyway

Time: 1:40 am

Felt slightly drunk with classic finger numbness. heh.

Time: 2:07 am

Feeling slightly stoned too, but the alcohol is masking most of the
good aspects of mj. can feel enchaced auditory appreciation but no
munchies yet.

Time: 2:18 am

ah feeling slightly stoned now. :) good. but it’s a more relaxed
laid back kind of stoned though, not like the seriously stoned you can
get when you smoke bowl after bowl after bowl

Time: 2:27 am

it feels strange, but good. :) i’ve had alcohol + mj before, in that
order. drank a six pack and smoked a couple of bowls and felt great
too, but this is somehow slightly different to that feeling. for one
thing i don’t feel so sedated i’m about to sleep. perhaps that coz of
the caffeine? had a couple of coffees before this too. it is a very
nice feeling though, very laid back and chilly. much more mellow that
smoking bowls but it’s fun too. not as intense, and you have to consume
a whole lot of pesticide while at it too.

Time 3:15 am

Feeling wasn’t satisfactory so i pored another shot of the stuff
into a 500 ml can of beer and skulled it. i can smell the mj. mmm

Time: 3:34 am

feeling pretty good now. 1/2 drunkish 1/2 stoned but not a lot of
head fuck unlike when i’m stoned. it’s pretty mellow and nice though.
would go well with a couple of valiums but i’m saving my stash for a
rainy day.

Time: 3:50 am

yeah feeling nice. stoned and a little pissed at the same time. nice
nice nice. I’m watching My Wife is 18 – the one by Ekin Cheng and I’m
laughing myself to tears
haha
not so funny is the fact that i watched disc 2 before watching disc 1 though coz the files were mislabeled on the network.

Anyway, the stuff was good, but not as intense as I would have
liked. Perhaps I should have dissolved more cannabis buds into the
alcohol, I’ll do that next time. Note that you need a high proof
alcohol to dissolve the stuff in, coz THC is alcohol (and fat) soluble
but not water soluble, thus you’ll want a high proof alcohol like
Bacardi 151 or even better, this 95% stuff.

November 08, 2002

Veritas – Latin for Truth

“Mr. Foaf” is back, but with a new handle. He wishes to be referred to as
“Veritas” now. I hear it’s Latin for truth. The usual disclaimers apply – I am not him, he is not
me, the views may not necessarily represent the views of sixthseal.com etc etc. This is his
report:

Lab Report: The relationship of annual seasons with respect to
horticulture

1. A small amount of cannabis will be manually shredded to maximize
combustible surface area.

2. The cannabis will the placed on the entry point known as the “cone” on the
smoking implement.

3. Heat will be applied to the cannabis.

4. The subject will inhale, forcing the smoke from the cannabis to enter the
chamber and exit the mouth piece.

5. The subject will hold the smoke in his lungs for 2 minutes.

Safety Issues :

Cannabis is known to induce laughter.

Solution: The subject will watch an unfunny video.

Cannabis is known to induce craving for food (“munchies”)

Solution: The subject has access to several chocolate bars and has the
option of ordering pizza.

Results :

The subject (“Veritas”) has heard an anecdote that the quality of weed
decreases during the summer months due to some unknown factor affecting the cultivation of the
plant. The source of the anecdote did not elaborate further. The subject is rather dubious of this
claim considering some of the best cannabis is produced from temperate countries like Afghanistan.
Furthermore, the very claim that heat is detrimental to cultivation is somewhat mind boggling as
hydroponics involves the use of very hot lamps to simulate the sun. Thus, the subject has managed
to get hold of some of this purported summer cultivated cannabis to prove the hypothesis wrong. The
subject has procured a new smoking implement from Off Ya Tree, which is a alternative culture shop
in Swanston Street, Melbourne. The subject has also gotten hold of a nifty combustion device which
the sales attendant at Off Ya Tree was very enthusiastic about. Apparently this device has a normal
flame,

a green (!) flame

and a purplish blue flame.

The different colors are attained from twisting a ring located near the top of
this device. The device also has a small compass embedded into the top of the lid, apparently to
help guide confused stoners to the way home. The subject has partially filled the smoking implement
(which will be referred to as a bong from now on) with H20 (that’s water for those of you who
failed Chemistry) and filled the cone with an appropriate amount of cannabis. The lighter was
applied to the cone and held there while the cannabis material slowly combusted and displaced the
remaining air in the chamber of the bong with THC smoke. The subject has found that the cannabis
does differ in potency with other batches he has tried. However, the subject maintains that this is
not because of any relation between seasons and plant cultivation times, but rather because the
cannabis is comprised mostly of leafy material and has minimal hairs and THC crystals. In other
words, this is piss poor weed. It is however, fairly damp, which supports the source of the
anecdote’s claims that this is a recent summer batch.

Conclusion :

The cultivation time of cannabis does not affect potency in hydroponically
grown plants. The subject has pulled this conclusion straight out of his ass and would advise you
not to quote him.